Eloy Ortiz Oakley talks to reporters after he was named chancellor of the California Community Colleges on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Sacramento, Calif. Oakley, the superintendent-president of the Long Beach Community College District, and a University of California regent, is the first Latino to head the 113-community college system. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)ASSOCIATED PRESS

An increasing number of colleges are using videoconferencing in online courses. But many videoconferencing systems are clunky and difficult for both students and professors to use. They don’t integrate well with so-called learning management systems (LMS), the software that schools use to deliver assignments, track test scores and connect professors to the administration.

For example, while a web conferencing tool may open in an LMS, the scheduling functionality wouldn’t. Meaning that for a teacher to invite students to a conference, they had to go into that software, schedule the meeting, then copy the details into the LMS as a note or calendar item for students.

That may not sound like a big imposition. But consider also that an outside conferencing and reservation system that does not integrate with class and student information could not identify students in real time or generate an attendance register, to cite just two of the many other complications.

But this inconvenience and complication gap may have finally closed, making real-time, classroom-esqe student engagement easier and more efficient and, therefore, more common. And since real-time engagement, as opposed to simply accessing a resource such as a recorded lecture, is a major factor in learning, the easier is to ramp up student engagement, the better.

The California Community College system, says Christina Jimenez, Public Information Officer for the CCC, is using a new technology that allows, “… an easy way to present online classes and keep students connected.” That new technology, called Zoom, or ConferZoom and powered by CirQLive, Jimenez says, is already, “integrated in 111 out 114 colleges at this time, with the remaining 3 colleges planning to integrate in 2019.”

“Presently, over 10,000 faculty and staff members are utilizing the ConferZoom service,” Jimenez said. And usage of the system has nearly doubled in the past year from 4,200 meetings a month to 8,500 a month in November. That’s a ton of meetings – on the order of one meeting every five minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“ConferZoom allows students, faculty and staff to attend classes and meetings from anywhere with the flexibility to join from a computer, laptop, phone, or mobile device,” Jimenez says. It also, “… provides high quality video and audio, desktop screen sharing, whiteboard with annotations, waiting rooms and, breakout rooms, all of which emulate the physical classroom.”

And soon, she says, “TechConnect will offer a new feature to the integration. Instructors will be able to offer students online office hours. Students will be able to use appointment booking and reserve a one-on-one meeting with their instructor.”

“You might think it isn’t a problem to just manually share the URL to that week’s lecture,” said Dov Friedman, a former teacher who co-founded CirQLive. “But there could be numerous lectures a week and, oops! next Wednesday’s has to be cancelled ,or its time edited, and that means going back out to the web conference platform to make that single change and then emailing it to every student – assuming the student emails were in there in the first place and assuming that they won’t get confused.”

There were other problems with the lack of integration too, Friedman says. “Privacy and security. Pulling student records outside of the LMS is just asking for trouble,” he said. “Furthermore, keeping it all in the LMS ensures that the student has one login and the professor knows who is sitting at the terminal for the live event.”

CirQLive, according to Friedman, has figured out how to be the bridge between two technologies that developed independently – the online video conference and the LMS. “It’s a lock-step approach and it works flawlessly,” he said.

“Anecdotally, students, faculty and staff throughout the system consistently state how pleased they are with the transition to the new ConferZoom platform,” Jimenez said. If it does what Friedman and Jimenez say it does, it’s easy to see why.

But the real test, the real benefit, will continue to be increasing the real-time access of students to their teachers and classmates – emulating the physical classroom, as Jimenez put it. In academia, that would be, and is, a big step forward from something that seems as though it’s just filling in a mundane technology gap.

I write about education including education technology (edtech) and higher education. I've written about these topics and others in a variety of outlets including The Atlantic, Quartz and The Huffington Post. I served as vice-president at The Century Foundation, a public po...